A wave of new volunteers, staff members and panelists has injected new life into the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs, which is experimenting this year while staying true to its traditional model.

Experts, academics, musicians, artists, journalists and other panelists will descend on the Boulder campus Monday for the 68th year of free panels, events and performances organized by hundreds of local volunteers.

The conference is piloting a new mobile application that provides users with a schedule of events, maps, speaker biographies and the chance to give feedback instantly.

Audience members at some panels — and those watching at home via a live webstream — will be able to text their questions to the moderators.

The conference also is partnering with campus departments to create a festival-like atmosphere by hosting concurrent events such as "Arts on the Green," which will highlight CU student and faculty art, film, theater, dance and music on Norlin Quad.

Attendees might notice a difference when they open up a paper copy of the CWA program this year, too. Rather than long, black-and-white lists of panels occurring each day, the schedule is laid out in color and by venue and time to help attendees better plan their week.

These innovations are the result of a new culture of democracy that formed within the CWA following the departure of many longtime staffers, participants and volunteers, CWA leaders say.

Though there were a lot of new faces in planning meetings this year, organizers say those people brought fresh perspectives, not inexperience, to the conference.

"Most of the people on the arts committee this year were pretty new at volunteering for the conference, so we had a steep learning curve," said Cindy Sepucha, a first-time CWA volunteer. "It was kind of a good thing because we started having ideas like, 'Why don't we try this?' I've heard that in the past there was a lot of, 'No, we don't do that. No, we've never done that before.'

"Most people have been really excited about some of the new ideas we came up with."

Rudy set to work recruiting new community members and students to volunteer for the conference. Griffin hired new paid staffers.

What Rudy uncovered was a perception that the conference was exclusive, that only certain people were qualified or invited to help plan it, a misconception she tried to reverse.

"One lady that I worked with, I said to her, 'Would you volunteer for the conference this year?' And she said, 'Me? I could work for the conference?' People out there kind of saw the conference as a closed organization, and they didn't know how to break in," Rudy said.

Emily Volk, a freshman who knew only a little about last year's conflict, said she was confused when she joined an organization that was friendly, welcoming and open to new ideas.

"It's not the old crowd," she said. "This is a group of new people that found it this year. It's an act of improvisation and experimentation."

Though organizers are experimenting, the bones of the conference are unchanged, Rudy said. And if audience members don't like some of the innovations, the CWA will consider their feedback when planning next year's conference.

Overcoming 'barriers'

Those new volunteers — who are responsible for recruiting panelists, finding them a place to stay in Boulder, designing panels and creating the schedule of events — met some roadblocks when they began reaching out to potential speakers.

At least 85 panelists said publicly that they would not return to the conference.

Some of the controversy spilled over into the new volunteers' work, even beyond the planning stages. Matt Seitz, editor-in-chief for RogerEbert.com, backed out less than a month before the conference when he heard about last year's conflict, which left volunteers scrambling to find a new host for the popular "Ebert Interruptus" film event.

Seventy percent of panelists are new this year. Nevertheless, volunteers put together a schedule that looks a lot like conferences of years past, with the addition of several other events, including a debate about genetically modified organisms, a poetry slam and an evening film screening and talkback.

"Whatever barriers that might've been placed in front of our program committee and team, they've jumped right over those barriers and totally succeeded," Griffin said. "I'm not going to say it's irrelevant, but they rose to the occasion."

As for fundraising, Griffin said it was too early to measure the conferences's success. The fiscal year ends June 30, and the organization tends to see a bump in donations shortly after the April conference.

"In terms of the more annual consistent donors, we've had similar numbers and maybe a little bit lower return thus far, but I think we have to get through this conference year," Griffin said.

The conference is still developing "significant donors," he said.

One change this year has been "modest" donations from individual campus departments, such as the College of Music, the Center for Environmental Journalism and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Griffin said.

The CWA's budget this year is $598,833, with 59 percent of funding projected to come from university sources and 41 percent projected to come from private donors, corporate sponsors and some grants.

The conference is working toward an even funding split between the university and the community.

Democratization

Though attendees likely won't notice it, Griffin said the biggest change within the organization has been its democratization.

Though the conference always claimed to be an open and inclusive organization, that was not true for everyone and was never formalized in any meaningful way, Griffin said.

Under the new governance structure, the community chair is elected and can serve no more than two consecutive one-year terms. Other volunteer leaders are also elected annually.

"If someone asks me what's changed about the conference, I can respond in a very heartfelt way: What's changed is that no one person can change anything by themselves," Griffin said. "To take the conference in an innovative direction requires a lot of consensus because of the structure that's been put in place. No one person is bigger than the CWA. That's what's true now."

Though the conference remains a university entity, Griffin as the faculty director and Rudy as the community chair are, on paper, equals on the organizational chart, a symbol that the CWA is still very much a community event.

"The relationship between the university and the community on this conference is a really rare and wonderful thing," Rudy said. "The fact that we have really put that on a piece of paper ... when people in the community realize and understand that, they will see they have just as much input in the CWA as the university does and that this belongs to them."

Conference on World Affairs director John Griffin, at right, works with student volunteer coordinators Hannah Garelick, left and Ben Grossman, about a work around of the planned shutdown of the university email accounts at the Conference on World Affairs headquarters on the CU campus on Saturday. For more photos go to www.dailycamera.com (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

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